Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the discount usability engineering movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces.

Nielsen, noted as the world's leading expert on Web usability by U.S. News and World Report and the next best thing to a true time machine by USA Today, is the author of the best-selling book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (New Riders Publishing, 2000), which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include Usability Engineering (Morgan Kaufmann, 1993); with Robert L. Mack, Usability Inspection Methods (Wiley, 1994); Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond (Morgan Kaufmann, 1995); International User Interfaces (Wiley, 1996); and with Marie Tahir, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (New Riders Publishing, 2001). Nielsen's Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers at www.useit.com.

From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute. He has been awarded 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use. Nielsen holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Technical University of Denmark.

Books from Jakob

In 2000, Jakob Nielsen, the world’s leading expert on Web usability, published a book that changed how people think about the Web—Designing Web Usability (New Riders). Many applauded. A few jeered. But everyone listened. The best-selling usability guru is back a...